> 'pro and con' for case is a very strong design choice. What if it's an open problem. What if It's a wrong question, based on poor representation of the problem?

Ok I see, and yes I agree.

Although to me, I don't think this is necessarily as big of a problem as people seem unable to stop making it out to be, which I tried to point out in my comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25904058

As I see it, the fundamental problem is the infinitely dimensional (recursively self-referencing, paradoxical, etc) nature of reality. A "right way" to model it is impossible - the best we can do is try to find a "good enough" (across all variables) approach, acknowledge (and gather opinions on) where we have fallen short and could improve, and iterate as you go. Kind of like life itself, "coincidentally".

In the super short run, even adding a "middle" column would be a huge improvement.

> I'm actually making tool for this exact same thing and the issue is most noticeable in kialo (which I argue is the same thing, with more mature UI). If you made all the research, conversations and planning to know, that answering this 'A or B' problem solves it, then Kialo (or that app) are perfectly fine tools. But most of the time people don't.

> https://www.loomio.org is another attempt at solving the same problem. It does provide some improvements, but also fails in interesting ways (mostly, I think, through not considering temporality very seriously).

I think this is the most interesting (and largely unrecognized) niche out there - in no small part due to the obvious inherent complexity and no obvious business model, but I feel like those may not even be the main reason - I truly that this space is "hard to see" for most people.

As for design of your product, what do you think of these pie-in-the-sky ideas (from the link above):

> I think that approaches like this website are a not yet a perfect solution, but it feels like a step in the right direction. An improved implementation would have some clever means of allowing a crowd-sourced decomposition of the issue into it's constituent entities and behaviors, graphically displayed in some magical way to maximize the likelihood of everyone seeing the big picture free from misunderstanding, which "all" parties could agree upon (no agreement means more refinement is needed) and refer to in their arguments (so we're all talking about the same thing), and arguments/thinking could take place with precision (attached to the the specific entities and behaviors where the true disagreement resides).

> A lot of people may have a strong aversion to this approach as it would turn easy argumentation into a painstakingly laborious & pedantic process, which is a natural consequence of using slow but accurate cognitive processing, rather than fast but unreliable heuristic processing (the root problem in the first place). Arguments under such a methodology would also more closely resemble the scientific method, or systems analysis in software (where one does not simply throw together an analysis and insist that it is 100% free of material flaws).

So if you take Trophi as a working prototype, could we add a second phase onto an argument, where "someone smart and unbiased" goes through all the arguments, and decomposes them into some "proper" representation, essentially comprehensively aggregating all the distinct points made in the arguments into a master summary, ideally with some sort of a "properly representational structure" between all the points. Perhaps then, in a phase 3, there could be voting &/or further discussion on this summary, the results of which would be passed back through phase 2 to expand and refine the model, also noting where genuine disagreement remains (specifically where in the complex, multidimensional model), and this process is repeated indefinitely - and when some new event occurs in reality, then that could be run through this very same process, updating the multiple related models based on the results of the process.

Obviously this is an incredibly ambitious idea, and is fraught with difficulties (gosh, why is reality so darn complicated!!), but even a half-assed version of it might provide some value - and, perhaps along the way, the true nature of reality might slowly start to dawn on some people, which plausibly might improve the performance of the participants in the overall process, recursively over time.